Matt Vaughan
King of Moody Rants
Bronze Level
I'm going to make a preemptive apology here, for what will undoubtedly become a somewhat long post. Skip to the bottom of this for a TL;DR version. But for anyone with a few extra minutes... please read on:
I'm relatively new to the world of poker software. I've logged a total of about 15,000 hands, with only about 6,700 of those being in cash games, and at least 4k of those 7k or so being in the past couple weeks (out of school for the summer baby!). And it's only in perhaps the past thousand or so that I've started really digging into some of the statistics and filters that the software that I use, Poker Copilot, offers.
I was looking through some of the broad, over-arching stats dealing with profit and volume: hands played, bb won/100 hands, $ won/100 hands, total winnings, and rake paid. It occurred to me that there was no stat saying "rake paid/100 hands." For whatever reason, this struck me as odd. A lot of people out there are probably thinking "well why would they bother with a stat like that," or for other skeptics, "you can calculate that for yourself you dummy." So I did.
Let's take my stats over the past 3 days (mostly so I don't have to show embarrassing losses by showing the whole week
). May 14th - May 16th. Sample size is obviously a factor for looking at things long-term, and accurately, but this will do for my purposes. These stats are solely from $0.02/$0.04 NLHE tables at Merge.
(See attached image)
Hands played: 2,156
Big blinds won/100 hands: 11.41
$ won/100 hands: $0.45
Total winnings: $9.84
Rake paid: $6.43
Wow. So in a little over 2k hands, I made a little less than three and a half dollars. $3.41 to be specific. My rake paid/100 hands for that sample is my total rake paid divided by the total hands played, times by 100.
(Rake/Hands)*100 = ($6.43/2,156)*100 = $0.2982 ≈ $0.30
Or, if you prefer:
Rake/(Hands/100) = $6.43/(2,156/100) = $0.2982 ≈ $0.30
That's 30 cents paid in rake per 100 hands. You'll notice that I'm only making $0.45/100 hands to begin with. So, if you will, that's only $0.15 profit/100 hands (which I think is a valid stat in its own right as well). (Note that we could have also arrived at $0.15 profit/100 hands by taking the profit $3.41, dividing by the total hands, 2,156, and multiplying by 100 => ≈ $0.16 => rounding error introduced because that $0.45/100 hands is more like $0.4564.)
I think a lot of people think of rake as unchanging, but if we think for a second, we realize that rake paid/100 hands is not constant, nor even necessarily the same between different players. (At this point, I must sheepishly ask if there would be people willing to share some data with me relating to how much rake they have paid, at what stakes, over how many hands, etc.)
Rake is not paid based solely on the # of hands we play, but also on the size of pots we play. So by turning it into a frequency, with rake paid/100 hands, we are actually getting a really good glimpse into the size of the average pots we play. A lot of people here are probably wondering "who cares?" I'm wondering that too. I don't know if it matters or not. But I'm intrigued.
On a similar note, I think it's so easy to get caught up in the bb/100 craze, that it's easy to forget about rake entirely. Particularly at the micros, where a lot of players may really have to fight to stay ahead of the rake, seeing where you fall there can be important, and give you a better idea not just of how well you are beating your competition, but of how profitable you are. And at least for someone like me, this is going to be what I'm interested in when looking at long-term stats.
Especially speaking as someone who doesn't get rakeback, and plays such low limits at Merge that he doesn't break into the VIP program, I'm going to have to beat the rake "by myself," so to speak. So I care. Maybe more than the average player, but I know there are others out there like me.
I know there is more I'm forgetting here that I've thought about, but hopefully this will generate at least a little discussion and might jog my memory. I'm curious to see what people think. Is this valid? Would you like to see your software incorporate it? Or are you totally disinterested?
And again, I must throw in a request for data. If you are so willing, please send me a pm, or just say you're willing in a reply to this thread. I won't need a whole bunch of statistics; pretty much just what is shown in the attached image.
TL;DR-version:
- bb won/100 hands, your win-rate, only partially represents your profitability at a given stake level
- Proposed stats: rake paid/100 hands, profit/100 hands (where profit takes your win-rate and subtracts your "rake rate")
- Rake paid/100 hands is not only helpful in determining profitability, but also gives some interesting insights into the average pot-sizes you play in at given stake levels
- Gib me yur data pleaze!
I'm relatively new to the world of poker software. I've logged a total of about 15,000 hands, with only about 6,700 of those being in cash games, and at least 4k of those 7k or so being in the past couple weeks (out of school for the summer baby!). And it's only in perhaps the past thousand or so that I've started really digging into some of the statistics and filters that the software that I use, Poker Copilot, offers.
I was looking through some of the broad, over-arching stats dealing with profit and volume: hands played, bb won/100 hands, $ won/100 hands, total winnings, and rake paid. It occurred to me that there was no stat saying "rake paid/100 hands." For whatever reason, this struck me as odd. A lot of people out there are probably thinking "well why would they bother with a stat like that," or for other skeptics, "you can calculate that for yourself you dummy." So I did.
Let's take my stats over the past 3 days (mostly so I don't have to show embarrassing losses by showing the whole week
). May 14th - May 16th. Sample size is obviously a factor for looking at things long-term, and accurately, but this will do for my purposes. These stats are solely from $0.02/$0.04 NLHE tables at Merge.(See attached image)
Hands played: 2,156
Big blinds won/100 hands: 11.41
$ won/100 hands: $0.45
Total winnings: $9.84
Rake paid: $6.43
Wow. So in a little over 2k hands, I made a little less than three and a half dollars. $3.41 to be specific. My rake paid/100 hands for that sample is my total rake paid divided by the total hands played, times by 100.
(Rake/Hands)*100 = ($6.43/2,156)*100 = $0.2982 ≈ $0.30
Or, if you prefer:
Rake/(Hands/100) = $6.43/(2,156/100) = $0.2982 ≈ $0.30
That's 30 cents paid in rake per 100 hands. You'll notice that I'm only making $0.45/100 hands to begin with. So, if you will, that's only $0.15 profit/100 hands (which I think is a valid stat in its own right as well). (Note that we could have also arrived at $0.15 profit/100 hands by taking the profit $3.41, dividing by the total hands, 2,156, and multiplying by 100 => ≈ $0.16 => rounding error introduced because that $0.45/100 hands is more like $0.4564.)
I think a lot of people think of rake as unchanging, but if we think for a second, we realize that rake paid/100 hands is not constant, nor even necessarily the same between different players. (At this point, I must sheepishly ask if there would be people willing to share some data with me relating to how much rake they have paid, at what stakes, over how many hands, etc.)
Rake is not paid based solely on the # of hands we play, but also on the size of pots we play. So by turning it into a frequency, with rake paid/100 hands, we are actually getting a really good glimpse into the size of the average pots we play. A lot of people here are probably wondering "who cares?" I'm wondering that too. I don't know if it matters or not. But I'm intrigued.
On a similar note, I think it's so easy to get caught up in the bb/100 craze, that it's easy to forget about rake entirely. Particularly at the micros, where a lot of players may really have to fight to stay ahead of the rake, seeing where you fall there can be important, and give you a better idea not just of how well you are beating your competition, but of how profitable you are. And at least for someone like me, this is going to be what I'm interested in when looking at long-term stats.
Especially speaking as someone who doesn't get rakeback, and plays such low limits at Merge that he doesn't break into the VIP program, I'm going to have to beat the rake "by myself," so to speak. So I care. Maybe more than the average player, but I know there are others out there like me.
I know there is more I'm forgetting here that I've thought about, but hopefully this will generate at least a little discussion and might jog my memory. I'm curious to see what people think. Is this valid? Would you like to see your software incorporate it? Or are you totally disinterested?
And again, I must throw in a request for data. If you are so willing, please send me a pm, or just say you're willing in a reply to this thread. I won't need a whole bunch of statistics; pretty much just what is shown in the attached image.
TL;DR-version:
- bb won/100 hands, your win-rate, only partially represents your profitability at a given stake level
- Proposed stats: rake paid/100 hands, profit/100 hands (where profit takes your win-rate and subtracts your "rake rate")
- Rake paid/100 hands is not only helpful in determining profitability, but also gives some interesting insights into the average pot-sizes you play in at given stake levels
- Gib me yur data pleaze!
